Open quantum systems and study of decoherence are important for our fundamental understanding of quantum physical phenomena. For practical purposes, a large number of quantum protocols exist that exploit quantum resources, e.g., entanglement, which allows us to go beyond what is possible to achieve by classical means. We combine concepts from open quantum systems and quantum information science and give a proof-of-principle experimental demonstration---with teleportation---that it is possible to implement efficiently a quantum protocol via a non-Markovian open system. The results show that, at the time of implementation of the protocol, it is not necessary to have the quantum resource in the degree of freedom used for the basic protocol---as long as there exists some other degree of freedom or the environment of an open system, which contains useful resources. The experiment is based on a pair of photons, where their polarizations act as open system qubits and frequencies as their environments, while the path degree of freedom of one of the photons represents the state of Alice's qubit to be teleported to Bob's polarization qubit.
Open quantum systems and study of decoherence are important for our fundamental understanding of quantum physical phenomena. For practical purposes, a large number of quantum protocols exist that exploit quantum resources, e.g., entanglement, which allows us to go beyond what is possible to achieve by classical means. We combine concepts from open quantum systems and quantum information science and give a proof-of-principle experimental demonstration---with teleportation---that it is possible to implement efficiently a quantum protocol via a non-Markovian open system. The results show that, at the time of implementation of the protocol, it is not necessary to have the quantum resource in the degree of freedom used for the basic protocol---as long as there exists some other degree of freedom or the environment of an open system, which contains useful resources. The experiment is based on a pair of photons, where their polarizations act as open system qubits and frequencies as their environments, while the path degree of freedom of one of the photons represents the state of Alice's qubit to be teleported to Bob's polarization qubit.
We report experimental results on the action of selected local environments on the fidelity of the quantum teleportation protocol, taking into account nonideal, realistic entangled resources. Different working conditions are theoretically identified, where a noisy protocol can be made almost insensitive to the further addition of noise. We put to test these conditions on a photonic implementation of the quantum teleportation algorithm, where two polarization entangled qubits act as the entangled resource and a path qubit on Alice encodes the state to be teleported. Bob's path qubit is used to implement a local environment, while the environment on Alice's qubit is simulated as a weighted average of different pure states. We obtain a good agreement with the theoretical predictions, experimentally recreate the conditions to obtain a noise-induced enhancement of the protocol fidelity, and identify parameter regions of increased insensibility to interactions with specific noisy environments.
Quantum teleportation relies on entanglement as the quantum resource to be able to communicate with fidelities beyond the classical limit. Nevertheless, the entangled resource may be afflicted by local noise, affecting its ability to serve as the entangled resource for quantum teleportation. We obtain experimental data on the influence of different local environments on the ability of an initially entangled pair of qubits to act as a teleportation resource, after it has been disturbed by noise. We generate selected conditions on the noise parameter space, both theoretically and experimentally, and we find that an already noisy protocol can be made practically insensitive to a further addition of noise. The experimental results are based on a photonic implementation of the quantum teleportation algorithm, with a polarization-entangled pair acting as the quantum resource. The state to be teleported is an additional qubit encoded in the path internal degree of freedom of Alice's photon. Interactions with different local environments on both sides of the system are either implemented with an extra qubit as the environment, or simulated as a weighed average of pure states. We compare our experimental results with the theoretical predictions, and by performing quantum process tomography we can calculate the fidelity of the quantum teleportation scheme and evaluate the effect of local environments.
Quantum entanglement and decoherence are the two counterforces of many quantum technologies and protocols. For example, while quantum teleportation is fueled by a pair of maximally entangled resource qubits, it is vulnerable to decoherence. Here, we propose an efficient quantum teleportation protocol in the presence of pure decoherence and without entangled resource qubits entering the Bell-state measurement. Instead, we use multipartite hybrid entanglement between the auxiliary qubits and their local environments within the open-quantum system context. With a hybrid-entangled initial state, it is the decoherence that allows us to achieve high fidelities. We demonstrate our protocol in an all-optical experiment.
Quantum teleportation provides a "disembodied" way to transfer quantum states from one object to another at a distant location, assisted by priorly shared entangled states and a classical communication channel. In addition to its fundamental interest, teleportation has been recognized as an important element in long-distance quantum communication, distributed quantum networks and measurement-based quantum computation. There have been numerous demonstrations of teleportation in different physical systems such as photons, atoms, ions, electrons, and superconducting circuits. Yet, all the previous experiments were limited to teleportation of one degree of freedom (DoF) only. However, a single quantum particle can naturally possess various DoFs -- internal and external -- and with coherent coupling among them. A fundamental open challenge is to simultaneously teleport multiple DoFs, which is necessary to fully describe a quantum particle, thereby truly teleporting it intactly. Here, we demonstrate the first teleportation of the composite quantum states of a single photon encoded in both the spin and orbital angular momentum. We develop a method to project and discriminate hyper-entangled Bell states exploiting probabilistic quantum non-demolition measurement, which can be extended to more DoFs. We verify the teleportation for both spin-orbit product states and hybrid entangled state, and achieve a teleportation fidelity ranging from 0.57 to 0.68, above the classical limit. Our work moves a step toward teleportation of more complex quantum systems, and demonstrates an enhanced capability for scalable quantum technologies.
In this work, we study quantum teleportation, a fundamental protocol of quantum physics. In particular, we present a mathematical methodology to study the combined effects of noisy resource state and noisy classical communication on teleportation fidelity and its deviation. We describe a teleportation protocol where an arbitrary two-qubit state in canonical form is used as a resource. Thereafter, to teleport an unknown qubit, Alice measures her qubits in Bell basis and conveys the measurement outcome to Bob via noisy classical channel(s). We derive the exact formulae of optimal teleportation fidelity and corresponding fidelity deviation where the resource state and the classical communication, both can be noisy. To provide the proof of optimality, we provide a systematic method. We further find conditions for non-classical fidelity and dispersion-free teleportation for our teleportation protocol. In this way, we identify noisy environments where it is possible to achieve dispersion-free teleportation without compromising non-classical fidelity. We also demonstrate scenarios where the increase of entanglement in the resource state, may degrade the quality of teleportation — a counter-intuitive instance. Finally, we discuss about the minimum classical communication cost required to achieve non-classical fidelity for our protocol. Here we mainly focus on a possible way to optimize the classical communication cost.
Quantum coherence and entanglement, which are essential resources for quantum information, are often degraded and lost due to decoherence. Here, we report a proof-of-principle experimental demonstration of high fidelity entanglement distribution over decoherence channels via qubit transduction. By unitarily switching the initial qubit encoding to another, which is insensitive to particular forms of decoherence, we have demonstrated that it is possible to avoid the effect of decoherence completely. In particular, we demonstrate high-fidelity distribution of photonic polarization entanglement over quantum channels with two types of decoherence, amplitude damping and polarization-mode dispersion, via qubit transduction between polarization qubits and dual-rail qubits. These results represent a significant breakthrough in quantum communication over decoherence channels as the protocol is input-state independent, requires no ancillary photons and symmetries, and has near-unity success probability.